


not this mind, and not this heart

by orphan_account



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future Fish, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Post-Apocalypse, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-06
Updated: 2014-11-06
Packaged: 2018-02-24 08:15:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2574509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world, and what happened after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not this mind, and not this heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ryukoishida](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryukoishida/gifts).



> the prompt: a soumako zombie apocalypse au.
> 
>  **warnings** for: some depictions of violence, blood (esp near the beginning), minor character death, a very loose and vague interpretation of survivor's guilt and ptsd, questionable moral values that must be excused for the sake of humanity. 
> 
> as far as world building goes, i'm afraid nothing is very concrete: the general premise is that at some point in time, an epidemic spread throughout the world, first in the west and then spreading to the east, that pulled the dead from their graves like marionettes. in the end i guess you could say this is more a story about sousuke and makoto with a vaguely apocalyptic backdrop than a zombie apocalypse story about sousuke and makoto. i wanted to just write a few short bits about them in this setting but 8) suddenly my projected word count doubled 8) 8) 8)
> 
> there will be cameos by basketball kids. they will not be happy cameos, and i apologize for that. title/end lyrics from mumford & sons' after the storm.
> 
> i honestly had so much fun writing this - never expected to fall in the way of soumako, but i really enjoyed thinking about them in such a setting a lot <3

\--

 

 

 

In the low lit stripes from the window blinds, everything looks wrapped in bandages, edges creased with dust and grime. There’s a desk, a broken lamp, one of those radios that looks like it belongs in an old movie. Little particles float in the slashes of light.

Sousuke’s lying on the only bed in the room. His head feels heavy, enveloped in something — bandages, probably. There’s a faint throbbing in his right shoulder. And a soft, warm voice pitching low notes across the room: _but I miss you most of all, my darling_ , the English cracking like thin ice.

“Hello?” he tries. His voice echoes in his own head, like there’s nothing in there anymore.

_No. No, don’t think that, don’t —_

The music stops just as he’s trying to figure out what song it is, and the only other person in the room peers over with a gaze barred in sunlight.

“How are you feeling?” asks the other man — he looks around Sousuke’s own age, which means he looks older than he is, a side effect of having a strong body and the polluted air outside. “Gave me quite a scare.” He doesn’t ask if Sousuke’s been injured anywhere else, or if he’s infected. They’re all infected. For a moment, the clouds shift outside, and the room gets swallowed by a feeble grey. The man’s eyes glint, green, and then the glint goes and he smiles. “You’re Yamazaki, right? I took a peek at your uniform.”

Sousuke considers this. Yamazaki. He turns the name over and over in his head, thinks about where it is now, in a crumpled heap on the floor.

“You can call me Sousuke,” he says.

“Thank you. I’m Makoto, I’m the doctor at this base.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

Makoto tilts his head, an unexpectedly soft gesture for a man of his size. “Why would you be sorry?”

“Because they’re going to run you into the ground, once this is over.” Sousuke tries to roll over and finds that he’s been strapped down to the bed. Alarm rolls through his body. How many drugs are running through his veins, for him to miss something like that? Makoto looks at him sympathetically, but stays, still, on the other side of the room. “I hear a lot of — well, human experimentation. Terms like that. Being thrown around. Especially since none of you are actually doctors.”

He doesn’t have to check. There are no more doctors left. They’re all dead, just like R—

Sousuke sucks in a deep breath, realizes that he’s probably gone too far. “Could you untie me?”

“I wish I could.” Makoto’s voice is gentle, fuzzy against the dust particles. “But you know as well as I do that I can’t, just in case…”

Right. Just in case. Sousuke exhales and the air tastes bitter. Just in case the symptoms worsen too fast. Just in case he rises up from the bed, a dead man walking, and has to be put down like a dog. The bitterness must show on his face, because Makoto finally takes a few steps closer to him. Up close Makoto looks much younger, closer to his mid-twenties, and his eyes are still clear, hair still soft. Sousuke hasn’t seen someone this clean for months, he thinks.

He needs a shower, he thinks, and shivers.

Makoto leans over him, his face tight with sympathetic pain, and he brushes Sousuke’s hair out of an awkward clump of blood, soothes it straight, rests the heel of his palm on one of Sousuke’s cheekbones. The pressure makes Sousuke feel like he’s stacking thick textbooks on his skull, but he can’t help leaning into the touch anyway, letting a faint sigh escape his mouth.

Makoto doesn’t leave his side again until he falls back asleep.

 

\--

 

_His dreams are fuzzy; he’s cold. The sun is made of rust, scattering blood-like particles across the sky. All the sounds that reach his ears are rounded, disintegrating at the edges. It’s snowing._

_She’s dying._

_Convulsing in his arms, her body freezing, her lips bruised purple and blue. In her eyes, nothing but pinpricks of darkness. Her hair, matted with blood, falling messily across her face. Her mouth, open._

_Sousuke holds her and wonders why she won’t stop fucking shaking, and then realizes that he’s the one who’s shaking. He opens his mouth and screams, why, fuck you, fuck you for going ahead and dying on me, **fuck you**  —_

_He sweeps her eyes closed with his thumb, and then peels them back open just in case._

_Never say the dead don’t rise, he thinks._

 

\--

 

“Yamazaki… Yamazaki. _Sousuke_.”

Someone’s shaking him awake. His head is pounding, chest is pounding. There’s the bar-lit room again, scorching stripes of sunlight branding white scars across her face, highlighting the sweetness of her smile, the fawn softness of her hair, the little hard glint in her eyes. Brown eyes, doe eyes.

Sousuke’s voice snags on the jagged edges in his throat and comes out like torn up cotton. “Riko?”

“You fell asleep on me, Yamazaki,” Riko frowns, brushing the hair out of his eyes with a quick, hummingbird gesture. “We’re supposed to be on surveillance.”

“Oh.” There’s fever wracking his body, flushing along the ridge of his cheekbones; his world blurs. “Sorry. Late night and all. Hyuuga’s got me doing all sorts of—stuff.”

Riko pauses, thoughtful. It’s broad daylight, and the smell of poison is strong in the air. They’re out of masks, ran out a week ago and no one’s had the sense to go out and scavenge for more. The word makes Sousuke want to throw up. Scavenge. Plunder. Whatever you wanted to call it. This isn’t what he thought he’d be doing, back when he was still at the academy, slipping ice cubes down the back of Rin’s shirt. Rin got tossed out into an overseas base when the epidemic struck Japan and he hasn’t heard a word about it since.

He hopes Rin is alive.

“Ya-ma-za-ki,” Riko says, nudging him in the arm.

“Huh… sorry, sorry.”

“Don’t be,” says Riko, and her cheeks hollow out, pupils shrinking; before Sousuke can do anything, her mouth opens wide and her teeth sharpen into fucking _fangs_ and she bites down, hard, into his shoulder, so hard that he yells and jerks backwards, knocking his head into the window.

“Riko,” he chokes out, dazed and unsure and terrified, “ _Riko_ -”

He grabs her and they go tumbling through the broken window, and that’s when his fingers clench around a piece from the windowpane and stabs it into the base of her skull.

 

\--

 

When he opens his eyes again it’s dark, and a darker shape is looming over him.

He screams and tries to sit up, sweat coursing down his back, blood down the side of his face, shit, _shit_  —

“Hey. Sousuke, hey. It’s just me, it’s Makoto — I came to check up on you, is that okay? Sousuke? It’s just me.”

Makoto? Who…

A dream? Was he dreaming?

“Riko,” Sousuke whispers, through cracked lips. “Riko’s dead, I killed Riko, she’s dead, oh my God — what if — what if she isn’t dead?”

“Sousuke -”

“I didn’t make sure,” Sousuke continues, horrified, “I didn’t make sure, what if I didn’t manage to, fuck, what if she’s still out there, I need to go make sure.”

“ _Sousuke_ ,” says Makoto, his hand coming out as if to touch Sousuke’s shoulder. He stops at the last second. “Can I touch you?”

Sousuke takes a deep breath, tries to hold it for a moment before the air throws itself from his mouth. He realizes he’s afraid, like someone’s peeled back a huge bandaid on all the fear and now it’s all there, exposed and stinging, ugly and red and raw and not healing. He shakes his head.

“Okay. Alright. You’re okay, Sousuke. Breathe in, nice and slow,” and Makoto’s voice relaxes a little, into something more malleable, the swing of a willow branch in a summer breeze, green with promise, alive and healthy, and — oh — it’s nice, young and tender.

“You’re okay, Sousuke, you’re fine,” Makoto keep reassuring him, as Sousuke’s eyes slowly adjust to the darkness and he can almost make out the color in Makoto’s, more vibrant than the rest of the rust-colored world, “you’re breathing steady, you’re fine,” and Sousuke’s chest is heaving with the effort, something tasting of tears catching in his throat.

He closes his eyes and counts to five and opens them again, lets his vision come back for a second time.

“Hand,” he eventually mutters, “can you — touch — hand.”

Makoto’s fingers come to rest in his palm, gentle and warm, real and alive, and Sousuke wants to cry if it wouldn’t mess up his breathing again. He curls his fingers around Makoto’s and imagines that he can feel Makoto’s heartbeat throbbing through the tips.

It’s quiet.

Back then, when he was younger and stupidly healthy and the world was green, he could hear the sounds of the night through the open windows. The night was never quiet back then, filled with the sounds of footsteps on the sidewalk, crickets, the wind, the karaoke machine from next door, loud laughter, arguments, reconciliations.

Now it’s quiet, the windows snapped shut and barred out if they’re low, people moving in cautious whispers.

“Thanks,” Sousuke hears himself say after a few minutes, and he realizes that Makoto’s been holding himself in an uncomfortable position the whole time just to be able to hold his hand. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Makoto returns, cheerful.

Sousuke swallows dryly. Feels his mind start to jump. “We’re all gonna be dead soon, aren’t we?”

“A-ah? No, don’t say something like that. Of course we’ll find a cure, you know that. We’ll definitely find a cure.”

“Look at us, though,” Sousuke tips back a bitter laugh, “look at us. We can’t even see the moon at night without thinking our heads will get bashed in, or. Or our brains will melt out of our ears, or everything we’ve ever loved in the world getting fucking eaten or contaminated, and even after we’re fucking dead, we don’t _stay dead_ -”

“Hey, hey.” Makoto’s thumb strokes across his own, gentle. “Don’t say that, Sousuke. Please don’t say something like that. We _will_ find a cure, I promise, I promise.”

“Too late,” Sousuke mutters stubbornly, closes his eyes.

“She won’t come back,” Makoto murmurs.

“What?”

“She. Your friend, the one with short hair… “

“Riko,” Sousuke says, the weight of the name tipping from his tongue heavily between the two of them. “Riko.”

“Yeah. I… when I found you, I -” Makoto’s shoulders twitch. Sousuke watches him shiver for a moment, wishes he could take the scratchiness in his voice and stroke it out, untangle the doubts caught up in the middle.

He doesn’t let himself think about Riko more than he has to, not about her wide dead eyes, the blackness trickling from the corner of her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Makoto says, so soft that it curls against Sousuke’s cheek, tender.

The lightning in Sousuke’s throat erupts. He turns his face away, jaw tightening. There’s not much energy left in him to do anything else. He has enough things to worry about, and the dead, the true dead, are not on that list anymore. There’s Riko, shaking in the snow; there’s Ai, gasping out _thank you_ as he and Momo slice him open, his cheek covered in dust and grime; there’s countless faces gaping at him with sightless eyes, nostrils flaring out, teeth sharp and bared.

They’re all gone.

Thank God, Sousuke thinks.

“I’m sorry, too,” he rasps, “thank you, again.” His pillow — not much of a pillow, actually — grows damp. “I’m sorry — my mind keeps wandering…”

“It’s okay. You’re okay, Sousuke, you’re okay…”

It’s a child speaking when he opens his mouth again, direct and young and bare, “Am I going to die, Makoto?”

Rin used to hate that, Sousuke remembers. Hated being asked loaded questions that he couldn’t answer properly. And Sousuke, Sousuke’s always asking them, questions designed to provoke, questions designed to hurt — except this time, he’s not sure who he’s hurting. He feels Makoto’s wrist tensing just as much as he feels his own chest pounding.

Yeah, he’s probably going to die, now that the thing’s entered his bloodstream. He wonders how Makoto’s going to break it to him, in that achingly soft way he has.

Makoto laces their fingers together. “Not on my watch, you won’t.”

 

\--

 

Eventually, his head wound heals. Makoto lets him shower, except they put him in this stupid leash to make sure he doesn’t go berserk and wreck the place. Even so, even with the stupid chains falling against the floor and the sad, slow trickle of water and the dingy lighting, Sousuke sighs in bliss, watches the water draining away go from murky to clear, and ignores the constant, pressing ache in his shoulder.

They have a vast and impressive collection of shampoo in different scents. Sousuke chooses the one that promises the most thorough cleanse. At least the water is warm, thawing him out slowly against the coldness.

Riko liked strawberry, he remembers: when they managed to get their hands on a bottle, when they had enough water to bathe, when they had enough time. He remembers her, stumbling into the showers swearing, emerging clean, grabbing an extra towel to snap at him. Ai liked the soft, sea breezy ones, and he used to pawn conditioner off Rin before this whole disaster started, smiling brightly with a soft silver cloud on his head.

Momo — Sousuke shakes his head. He has no idea where Momo could be, doesn’t want to think about it.

The movement calls water droplets to fall against the hard case on his shoulder. He cranes his head to look at the wound, but of course he can’t see a thing. Makoto made sure of that. Instead he sees the tips of his hair, dark and curling. If he lets it fall, loose, his bangs almost reach the bridge of his nose. Maybe he should get it cut.

Makoto pokes his head into the bathroom and Sousuke jumps.

“Better?” Makoto chuckles, backing out through the doorway again.

“Yes. Thank you,” Sousuke’s been keeping count of how many times he has to thank Makoto. Yesterday afternoon he lost the count. “Much better.”

“Feels nice, doesn’t it?” Makoto asks, after he’s done changing, pulling on scratchy clothes that, normally, would be slightly tight on him. Since the epidemic he’s done nothing but lose weight, ribs starting to arch out, face just short of skeletal. Nothing could have been done. A little part of him, every day, is still grateful that the number of people dying outnumbers the meals they still have left to keep going.

“Mm. My head feels a lot lighter without the bandages and the shitton of dust and blood in it.”

The smile Makoto gives him almost negates the humiliation of having the leash snapped on again, so that he can be led back to his room.

“You remind me of my friend,” he says, soft, “he would always complain about the lack of water. He could spend hours and hours just _soaking_. Weird, huh? But that’s Haru. Weird and you can’t not love him, at the same time.”

Sousuke doesn’t know what to say. He nods, feels the collar tightening as he swallows.

Makoto laughs again. “He’s looking for a cure a lot more diligently than I am.”

Sousuke’s head snaps up.

“Someone’s got to take care of… the wounded, you know… Haru… he… wasn’t very good at that kind of thing. But he always had these crazy ideas, and they usually worked on more intense cases. So I would take care of the people, and he would try to do research. It was hard, at first. We had people help, a chemist who would double as a hunter sometimes. But then both of them were sent overseas, and I haven’t heard from either of them.”

“Oh,” says Sousuke. He feels a hollow pang in his stomach. After a few moments, he realizes it’s helplessness. He’s not good at this, communicating with people like this, in these one-on-one settings, anymore. “I’m… I can understand that. My best friend’s also overseas.”

“Doing great things for the future of humanity,” Makoto quips, a direct quote from one of the last published newspapers. Most of humanity’s read the issue enough times to have it down by heart.

“Yeah,” Sousuke agrees, for lack of anything else to say, or maybe because the other alternative is something he’d rather not voice.

Makoto has to lock him back into place, apologies written all over his face. He’s snapping the lock into place, caging him in a barred off section of the room, when his fingers start shaking.

“Need help with that?” Sousuke asks, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

“No, I’m fine, I just -” a muted, dead laugh punches itself out of Makoto, “I don’t even know if they made it overseas, you know? It’s not like we have a lot of communication. I don’t know how they’re managing it. I don’t know if they need me to send them anything, or if they’ve even written to me.”

“Or if they’re still here?” finishes Sousuke, quietly pushing the lock together, taking Makoto’s hands away and holding them carefully in his own through the bars. He's looking at the way their hands fit together, fingers tapered by hunger and exhaustion, knuckles and joints appearing too big. Even so, it looks natural enough that he can keep his cool.

Makoto takes several deep breaths. “I’m so sorry, I know — I didn’t mean to bring up -”

“Hey. You’re the same, aren’t you? You don’t have to worry about that with me.”

“I’m sorry. You’ve just. I know you’ve lost -”

“Come here,” Sousuke says, so softly that he can almost feel the words touching his lips, and he keeps holding Makoto’s hands. Makoto listens, pressing his face closer, close enough that their breathing starts to mingle, and Sousuke can see the green of his eyes, the curve of his eyelashes. “You’re still here, aren’t you? I’m still here. That’s more than enough reason to believe.”

Makoto opens his mouth, closes it. Nods his head. His lips look soft.

Sousuke wants to kiss him so badly, the rush of desire thundering up his spine, choking up in his throat. He watches Makoto’s pupils spin wider, dark.

“Come here,” he says again, and again, Makoto listens, tilting his face almost obediently. Sousuke takes a moment to just breathe, his breath shuddering and careful, watching Makoto’s eyelashes fan out, delicate, over his cheek. Then he kisses him slowly, enjoying the way Makoto melts against the bars, all the tension in his body ebbing out.

“Open your eyes,” Sousuke whispers against his mouth, and Makoto does, giving Sousuke a view of the rarest color in the world.

“This is nice,” Makoto murmurs.

“Yes,” and Sousuke kisses him again, soft and chaste, lets the reality of the world fade away around him.

 

.

.

.

.

 

_It feels like waking from a bad dream, and then forgetting all about that dream._

_The world begins to rebuild itself slowly, humanity struggling to its knees and then slowly upright again, on two shaky legs._

_They say the cure was found in the wilderness of Australia, and then again deep in the African jungles, and a glimmer of something in Brazil, and soon enough, just like the epidemic, it spread._

_Makoto adjusts his glasses and leans back in his chair, letting the breeze flutter in through the open window. He revels in a clear blue sky, spring charging rampantly through the air. He rotates his wrist, feels it crack, and then continues to review procedural documents._

_There’s a little plaque hanging on the walls of the station with the names of those who, in the words of the higher uppers, sacrificed themselves nobly for the sake of humanity. It’s a little sugarcoating tendency that Makoto’s started to notice in himself. The first time he saw the name 'Aida Riko' engraved into the plaque he nearly fainted._

_What, he thinks, what would Sousuke say if he walked into the fire station now?_

_There aren’t that many fires anymore. People are more careful than they used to be, although he thinks it’s a little useless after the disaster. Iwatobi’s a quiet little town, and he can smell the sea if he closes his eyes._

 

.

.

.

.

 

He watches Sousuke die.

The truth of the matter is: in this whole base, there are only six people left. Him, a silent hunter, a boy who turns meager scraps of food into delicious things, Aki, Rei’s brother, and Sousuke.

Aki and the silent hunter strap up on knives and guns and look like murderers as much as they do heroes, and they go out and they hunt, and they kill, and they keep the rest of them alive. At sundown they come back and Makoto meets them over bowls of god-knows-what, sharply flavored, and he and Aki and Rei’s brother talk.

About Sousuke, mostly, while the boy chef, rendered mute from shock when Makoto found him and now only able to say the word “sorry”, watches them carefully. They talk about what to do with Sousuke, now that he isn’t looking so good, and Makoto feels like a horrible, horrible liar.

When they finish he goes up to see Sousuke, leaning pale against the bars of his cage, death’s smile kissing his lips.

“That kid,” he rasps, “Ryou… reminds me of Ai.” Sousuke laughs weakly, his eyes growing wide and empty. “Same goddamn huge doe eyes. Tiny fingers, like kids’ fingers.”

“Oh,” _oh_ , no, Makoto thinks, and he reaches out and takes Sousuke’s hands, frail and shaking as they are, and they sit like that in the dimness, Sousuke resting his tired head against the bars and Makoto’s arm, and Makoto wonders if this is what happens when heroes get robbed of their purpose, if all the guilt that they have to learn to shoulder simply becomes too much for them and they break. The buttons on Sousuke’s shirt aren’t done up properly, giving Makoto a glimpse of the bruises across his chest — old bruises, he guesses, from the harnesses he used to wear when he went out to save the world.

Sousuke shifts next to him, weak and trembling. “Sorry,” he whispers.

Makoto feels something angry welling up in his eyes.

“Sorry I made you break your promise.” A shaky, shaky breath. “This isn’t even safe. What are you doing? You’re not safe here.”

The way he says it, all slow and tired and sad, makes something rise, like a siren’s wail, up Makoto’s spine. “No, no. No, it’s not you, it’s never you, you’re okay, you know that, right? Sousuke, you’re okay, you’ll be alright.”

“I’m disgusting, I’m _dying_ , you’re not safe here, please.”

“I’m not leaving,” Makoto says, frightened numb, “I’m not letting you go, okay? I won’t leave you.”

Sousuke’s hand twitches in his own for a second, like he’s trying to muster up some kind of fighting spirit, but instead he just slumps further, his exhausted eyes slipping shut.

 

\--

 

But before then, it was almost — nice.

Before then when both of them could pretend things were real, when they could stay up late for hours and hours, watching the lights flicker, Sousuke would calmly ask for kisses, and Makoto would give them with increasing confidence. Sousuke’s mouth was always soft around the tips of his fingers, soft and warm and wet, making Makoto blush. Makoto was always good at make-believe; when he was little, it was with Haru, building imaginary castles; now it’s maybe less ambitious, with Sousuke, and he pretended — oh, lots of things —

— he pretended they were secret lovers, meeting in a crystal cave by candlelight. The first time he voiced this thought, Sousuke laughed so hard that he gave himself a cramped stomach, which only, for some godforsaken reason, made him laugh harder, and Makoto, eyebrows jumping up in worry, had to explain to him, _what, you’ve never seen Aladdin or read 1001 Nights_ , and then told him stories in his best imitation of Scheherazade the whole night through.

— he pretended they lived in a globe of firelight, that they could melt away the bars of Sousuke’s cage with a touch of his finger. Sousuke agreed that this was a good make-believe and made sound effects when he tried it, trying to copy the sizzle of something cooking.

— he pretended they lived in a little cottage drawn up by Andersen himself, a delicious smelling little cottage with flowers and quaint windows and tea always at the ready. Sousuke humored him on this one, and asked him about the visitors to their make-believe cottage, to which Makoto sometimes answered with “a talking cat” or “the little match girl, she would need some warmth from all this cold” or “I don’t know, it’s your turn to answer the door”, and sometimes answered with “no visitors” and a soft smile, a soft kiss or two.

— mostly, though, he pretended they were sitting on a couch with the television on, pretended they could tangle up their legs together and pretended he could mouth lazily at Sousuke’s jaw, his throat, his pulse point, and taste the evidence of life there.

 

\--

 

The door bursts open just as Makoto’s reaching out, shaking so hard that he bangs his wrist against the metal, and then suddenly someone throws himself hard onto Makoto’s body, grasping him tight, breathing wet sobs against his neck. Through the sudden chaos he can just make out his name being chanted, over and over, desperate and strange and familiar all at once.

“Makoto — Makoto’s, you’re here, I’ve — fuck, you’re alive, Makoto,” and then, slowly, recognition comes.

And it sinks sharp, painful fangs along the insides of his throat, immediately choking up tears in his eyes, because the person clinging to him isn’t real, he can’t be real. People don’t just _appear_ after long absences like this, and not _him_ , his hair longer, something long and silver dangling from his ear, a low wrecked note bowed into his voice.

“Makoto,” the maybe-not-person repeats, faint and trembling, and Makoto swallows around all the glass in his throat and speaks.

“... Haru?”

Haru’s blue eyes search his face frantically before all his words come tumbling out in a mess. “You’re thinner. What _happened_ here? Who’s that? Oh god I thought… I was so afraid, but you… You’re alive, though, you’re alive, I thought you… we didn’t hear anything for so long, what happened?”

It’s all happening so quickly that Makoto can’t speak, he can’t — he wants to say a million things at once and they won’t fit through the too-small column of his throat and they snag on his teeth and clutter up on his tongue, so he just dips his head forward and lets himself revel in the slender strength that is Haru, his best friend, the strong one, the one that always protected him, beautiful strong fearless Haru. He breathes in the scent of Haru’s skin and doesn’t care that he smells different from when they were younger, because underneath it all is the prevailing sensation of _safe, safe, I’m safe, Haru’s here and he’s alive_.

Another figure rushes into the room, stops short.

Haru shifts. “Rei,” he says, and that’s all it takes. Rei’s face crumples into the brightest smile Makoto’s ever seen as he spreads his arms around them and crushes them all against the rusting cage.

It takes another minute before Makoto pulls himself back together, alarmed and guilty. “Haru. Rei. What are you doing here?”

“Oh!” Rei’s breathless, tears shiny on his face. “Oh, Makoto-senpai.”

He takes a deep breath and pulls a vial out of his pocket, just like he used to dream of doing.

Makoto’s breathing stutters and stops.

“We found a cure.”

 

\--

 

_It doesn’t take him that long to go back to the life he led before: wandering into the bakery down the street in the barely-dawn orange sunlight, getting some kind of cream cheese croissant for breakfast. Haru goes right back to where he was before, cuts his hair shorter, silently hands him a small paper bag with a pastry inside, a cup of over-sweetened coffee._

_They carry their scars from the end of the world, Haru’s in the shape of a long, silver earring and the careful way he watches people, the way his hands are less sure than they used to be, tucking in the ends of a cupcake box, stacking oven trays together and making them rattle. Makoto hears things that don’t exist, phantom yells of pain, the clanging of chains. He keeps his windows shut when it gets dark out and holds onto things that he shouldn’t._

_But on the surface, when the rest of the world stirs and yawns and stretches the memory of the epidemic out and away into the past, Makoto more or less moves on with them, thumbing through papers or scrolling aimlessly through news sites on his work computer._

_His colleagues mutter to themselves around him, worried, in flickers. Makoto tries not to think about that._

_He meets up with Rei sometimes, over cups of flavorless tea, and they don’t discuss the dead._

_“Haruka-senpai and I met someone while we were overseas,” Rei tells him instead. _“_ He was the first person we cured. The first person who broke through the mental wall. And then he helped with everyone else.”_

_“That's amazing,” Makoto replies. _“_ Did you keep in touch?”_

_Rei shakes his head. “He said he would, but he was going to travel the world and figure out exactly what caused everything. He wanted to take Haruka-senpai with him, but he said no. Not yet, anyway. I guess he just went on with his life after that.”_

_Going on with his life is precisely what Makoto's been doing, but for some reason, this mystery guy seems to be doing it better - not surprising, Makoto thinks. Everyone seems to be getting on better._

_Rei went right back to the lab, rebuilding and working crazy hours, and knows better than to bring up their time at the base. There are things Makoto holds onto a little more tightly than others._

 

\--

 

Once, they try to talk about it.

He’s strapping Sousuke down into bed with soft apologies and softer kisses, and this Sousuke is still relatively healthy, still able to laugh without grimacing afterward.

There’s really not an excuse for him to be seated on Sousuke’s legs while he’s fiddling with the buckles, but he does it anyway; Sousuke says he doesn’t mind, and it gives Makoto comfort when he can feel Sousuke’s eyes on his fingers, doing their clumsy dance with the fine knobs and strings.

“You know,” Sousuke’s voice comes out a little husky, “you know, if someone walked into this room right now they would probably never think you were doing this for security purposes.”

It makes Makoto blush even though he knows; it isn’t like he hasn’t thought about it, when instead of simply getting off the bed he reaches up to cage his hands on either side of Sousuke’s head, leaning down to slot their mouths together. He could grind down just as easily and watch Sousuke’s head fall back onto the pillow, helpless, jaw slack. He _does_ grind down, a little, starved of this kind of touch, a sharp, startled groan driven out of him.

“What are you doing?” Sousuke hisses, red blooming across his face, his eyes dark and fierce.

Makoto shudders. “I… I don’t know, I’m sorry…”

It probably looks bad, the hesitation, the way he picks himself gingerly up and off of Sousuke, unspoken words tripping up his limbs. I want you, he wants to say, I want you so badly, you don’t even have to do anything, I’ll make you feel so good, Sousuke, I will. When things are messy like this, messy and undefined, with the world sinking into its robbed grave, these kinds of things are easy to forgive, aren’t they?

It probably looks bad enough that Sousuke’s expression relaxes a fraction. “Idiot,” he says, quiet, “can’t this even wait until I can hold you properly?”

Makoto clicks off the old lamp and scurries from the room, his heart leaping into his throat and choking up whatever he wanted to say.

 

\--

 

_What’s most jarring are the colors._

_He doesn’t realize how much he’s missed the cooler colors until he comes face to face with the ocean, vast and stormy blue. He doesn’t realize how blue the sky can be until he sees it as a rippling plane across the water, until the blueness sears his eyes and he sees bright, blinding spots of phantom light on the backs of his eyelids._

_It’s turning autumn now, but the leaves are still green, deeply so, the grass soft and emerald underneath his shoes, and the shadows on the sand are blue-purple and calm._

_He and Haru are sitting at the edge of the water one day, watching the white-lined tide lash at their toes, breathing in the clean smell of sea salt._

_Haru turns to him with one of his quick, soft gestures, the top layer of his hair lifting in the sea wind, and says, “What are you going to do about Sousuke?”_

_Sousuke, huh, Makoto wants to say all soft and thoughtful, except the name cracks in two like he’s dashing glass against stone._

_Sudden, unexpected, sharp. Splintering against his ribcage. He’s pulled under the waves, trying not to think about, thinking about it all the more for his efforts._

_“Makoto,” Haru’s voice is soft against the lapping of the waves, in a way that Makoto can’t imagine, “you have to do something.”_

_“Like what, though?” He doesn’t want to admit that he doesn’t want to do anything. That he can drift in this kind of half-hoping, half-dreading state of denial forever, out over the sea. A cloud passes over the sun. He’s missed hours upon hours of sitting with Haru at the beach, an entire year’s worth of sitting here in the amiable silence that Haru provides best, an entire year’s worth of Haru letting him talk and talk, laughing to himself, kneading the sand under his palm while wondering what it’ll be like to live in a big city like Tokyo._

_Haru’s still quiet, but the depth to the silence faded away a while ago. Makoto wonders how much the past year and a half carved out of his life, but he’s afraid to ask. A year of separation doesn't melt away overnight; nothing melts away overnight. All he knows is that Haru was there, his eyes shimmering, face wet, when they found the cure, that Haru was the one who had to hold the person down, brush the inked scarlet bits of hair out of his face._

_He knows that Haru and Rei went through an ordeal with the government, that they spent a night or two in a cell, miserable and resigned, before everything cleared up and they were sent home and apologized to._

_He watches as Haru shakes his head, making the gesture as graceful as only Haru can do. When they were kids Makoto always wondered if Haru was more moon than human, pale and mysterious, always as certain as the wax and wane — until the first time Haru had to be dragged out of a public fountain, dripping and irritable. There’s a lot less being silent together and lot more being **silent** together nowadays._

_Makoto misses the past. He feels like he’s the only one who does so anymore._

_“He saved our lives, you know,” Haru states, careful, skating along the shallow silence until it starts to crack, except this time he takes Makoto along, “it’s not like you not to say thank you.”_

 

\--

 

Watching Sousuke wake up is kind of one of Makoto’s favorite things about the morning. Catching that glimpse of teal-blue, clean in a world of rust and disease, makes his breath flutter.

Haru and Rei track down the others in the base, Ryou, Aki, wait nervously for Rei’s brother to return downstairs while Makoto watches each butterfly blink of Sousuke’s eyes with a pounding heart. They had to towel Sousuke off while he fidgeted, sweating and healing, in his unconscious state, but the one tiny towel from the bathroom wasn’t enough, and Makoto didn’t hesitate to strip off his shirt instead, running it under water, while Haru and Rei traded semi-alarmed, semi-amused looks in the background.

“Nice,” Sousuke croaks, trying to hold both his eyes open.

Makoto breathes.

“Can’t even keep your shirt on around me…”

Makoto swallows back the urge to say _there are children present_ , and instead contents himself with smiling, so hard that it hurts his face. “How do you feel?”

“Light,” breathes Sousuke, who then wakes up a little more. “What happened?”

What happened, wonders Makoto. Sousuke sits up slowly, notices that his shoulder is merely wrapped up in bandages instead of a cast. He looks like he's been handed a present and doesn't know how to unwrap it, like a kitten encountering a new toy. Sometimes Makoto forgets. It's easy to forget what happened to bring Sousuke to his doorstep when he looks like this, all light and faintly happy, the tilt of his mouth tentative.

“We’re going to win,” Makoto tells him, relishing how sharply sweet the words taste, how foreign, “we’re going to win.”

 

\--

 

_The best color in the world is green, Sousuke told him once. Green means life. He’d spread out his hands, as best he could, chained as they were, stretching out towards the outside world. Outside, everything’s dead or dying. Hell, even inside, we’re all dead or dying. I haven’t seen anything green for so long._

_Makoto peers out the window, the panes making a glossy, flat curtain between him and the forest outside. A year ago the trees all bled rust and disease, the earth setting itself aflame trying to scorch out the epidemic, and now it’s like everything is coming back together to overcompensate, creating a dark green tapestry in front of his eyes, vivid and supple and strong, humming with life._

_He’s standing in his childhood bedroom, in his childhood home tucked cozily into the woods, protected, he supposes, by the shrine up ahead. Protected is a loose word. The house, protected. Its tenants, not so much._

_When he was home, Makoto thinks, and then freezes. Is that what they call it these days? Some things you just can't call home. Some things you have to learn to know as home. He takes a breath to realign his thoughts into something more acceptable._

_When he was at the base._

_When he was at the base, Makoto tries again, waiting for the end of the world, and Sousuke asked him what song he was singing when they first met._

_Something my mother liked to sing to me, Makoto had said, but I can’t remember the rest of it._

_Sousuke’s head sank back into his pillow, restless. This is going to bother me forever._

_Sorry, Makoto told him. That’s one thing I can’t fix, for sure._

_As it turns out, that wasn't the only thing Makoto couldn't fix._

_Then I’ll fix it myself. It sounds familiar enough. And Sousuke would go around, humming, surprising Makoto with how clearly he could replicate the tune._

_Since you went away, the days grow long_ , Makoto whispers to himself, and doesn’t scream when he hears, from the doorway:

“It’s Edith Piaf, isn’t it?”

 

\--

 

The clock on the wall says it’s 2:54 in the afternoon. Makoto believes it for a few seconds before he remembers that he hasn’t replaced those batteries since he last visited, two Christmases ago.

He’s there; he’s filled out into his body again, long and strong, his arms folded across his chest, his hair cut short, his eyes impassive.

“Sousuke,” says Makoto around the numbness in his tongue.

“Makoto,” replies Sousuke, his voice stiff.

“You…” the difference between this and the way he and Haru reunited bleeds him dry, turns him pale. “Did you break into my house?”

“You don’t have any locks,” Sousuke explains. His face is empty. “Not a single one.”

“Oh.”

Makoto hates locks now. The feeling of being confined in a building, even for safety’s sake — he doesn’t know how to react anymore. He supposes he should have something on his front door, repair the broken doorknob at least.

“It’s not like it matters.” Sousuke hasn’t moved from the doorway. “Nothing’s going to happen to you now. I… stopped by because they wanted me to send you this.” He hands Makoto an envelope, carefully flattened and smoothed out. “You can open it.”

He does; it’s a certificate.

“We had to pull a few strings, but you’re in the clear. For human experimentation. We had to explain that you couldn’t… that there wasn’t anyone…”

“Thank you,” Makoto hears himself say, detached, polite.

Sousuke nods and turns to walk away, more and more of a stranger with each passing second.

Makoto tries to count to ten to calm himself down, the way he always does, but gives up at two. He can’t make sense out of it. He knows Sousuke like he knows fires, like he knows the way life creeps back into the world. He can feel the texture of Sousuke’s skin under his hand and the press of his lips on his mouth and it doesn’t make any sense why he can’t have any of it anymore.

He’s been letting go of so many things. Had to let go of so many things.

“Sousuke, wait,” he says, “wait.” It takes him seconds, actual seconds to get the words out, and when he does he feels lightheaded with nervousness, “why… why did you leave?”

“What do you mean,” Sousuke returns, cautious, deliberate.

“Why did you leave, back then? We… I thought we were…“

“I thought you wanted me to leave.”

“What? _Why_?”

“You had.” Sousuke takes a step into the room, into Makoto’s childhood — his space. “You had your friends back. I had to find mine.” He pauses. “And keep your ass out of trouble with the government.”

“So — I could have helped, Sousuke! I could have. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why was I _supposed_ to say anything? We’re practically fucking strangers anyway. What we did was just for comfort. Waiting for the worst. What did _you_ think it was?”

“Comfort,” Makoto repeats hollowly, trying to make sense of anything at all and coming up blank still.

“Yeah. Look. I’m sorry I left so abruptly. But it wasn’t a fairy tale trying to set anything back in order, you know that. There was no way I couldn’t leave.” Sousuke lets his eyes fall shut, and the heaviness of his eyelids makes Makoto’s chest hurt and his fingers clench.

“You’re lying,” he accuses softly, “aren’t you?”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“But you _are_. Lying. You’re lying,” Makoto repeats, becoming more sure of it. He can’t explain everything, but he can explain the way Sousuke avoids his eyes, the way he doesn’t dwell on the subject, and he can’t explain everything but there are things that don’t need explaining. The way Sousuke used to lean into him, trusting, the way Sousuke used to whisper things like _I wish I could hold you_ and the way Sousuke liked to point out how his hair never really fell into place. “You, this. Us.”

You can’t just kiss a person at the end of the world and pretend it was for _comfort_ , Makoto thinks almost desperately.

“And if you really didn’t care, what is this?” He gestures to the certificate. Merit. Bravery. Valor. “Why would you bring me this instead of a pair of handcuffs?” He lets the paper drop with a breath onto his bed. “You’re a terrible liar,  you know that, right?”

“I didn’t think you wanted me to stay,” Sousuke says after a moment of horrible, horrible silence. “After you. After I got better, there wasn’t really a point to me staying, was there?” A beat. “I wanted to stay, but I was ultimately too selfish.” A laugh. “I was selfish enough to try and keep people close to me before we met, too, but look what happened to them. I fought too hard and in the end I couldn’t keep a single one.”

Makoto ends up biting his lip while Sousuke’s talking, almost hard enough to cut, and when at last the silence resettles he looks back up towards Sousuke to see him with his eyes focused determinedly on the corner of the wall.

“Come here,” Makoto says, soft and helpless. “Please.”

It takes time. It always takes time, but Sousuke listens, and Makoto swears his footsteps tremble when they fall.

“Please believe me when I say I wanted you to stay,” Makoto gets out, his mouth fighting to form the words correctly. The sudden close proximity means that he can smell Sousuke’s scent, clean and a little sweet, can smell the clean laundry smell of his clothes, the crispness of his shirt, the warmth of his skin. “Please trust me.”

He wants — so much, a frightening amount of want washing over him, wants everything properly this time, not caught between an ongoing nightmare and a meager illusion of waking. Sousuke’s hands come to steady him on his arms and he starts to shake, and then Sousuke’s entire body relaxes and he sighs a tiny sigh, one that sounds like _yes_.

“Come here,” Makoto repeats, just like that time so many months ago, and Sousuke dips his head down ever so slightly and meets him halfway in a kiss.

 

\--

 

Makoto thinks there are a million reasons why this is better than anything:

One, the warm rub of skin on skin, bare, soft, the space between them nothing. Two, the way Sousuke’s hair slides between his fingers, shorter than he’s used to, soft. Three, the way Sousuke’s hands feel on his skin, the way they wander along his spine and come around to stroke his stomach, all gentle.

He can’t stop kissing Sousuke, feeling like a teenager in his first relationship all over again; he can’t stop pushing his mouth insistently against Sousuke’s, like he needs to make sure that both of them are still there, and Sousuke just answers him each time, just as hungry, just as desperate.

They’re leaning against each other while they kiss and it isn’t filthy in the way Makoto used to think it might happen. He doesn’t moan and Sousuke doesn’t moan, but these soft, pleased noises come up between them, and sometimes an affirmative —  _yes? yes, yes_  — before they go back to it. They. Them. The two of them. Makoto sighs into Sousuke’s mouth, _yes, so good, so good_.

It feels like a dream when Sousuke pushes him down onto his bed, with the forest still green and growing outside and the sky clear and blue. He closes his eyes and believes, believes in everything believes that he smells the sea breeze and believes that everything is finally, finally figuring itself out. Opens his eyes just to make sure - there's Sousuke, straddling him on his bed, his skin healed and perfect, flushed over the smooth tan of his shoulders, his chest. He leans over Makoto and is so close that Makoto can just taste the heat of him.

“Gonna make you feel good, Makoto,” Sousuke breathes into his ear, so earnestly, “I want to make you feel so, so good, fuck, I missed you so much.”

“Yes,” yes, he’s here, they’re still here, and the world won’t end just yet.

Sousuke smiles at him as he slides his pants off, like he can’t believe it either, and Makoto just lies there, thinking: _it’s fine. It’s fine, I will believe twice as hard for the two of us._

It doesn’t take long for both of them to finish, with Sousuke’s hand slick with Makoto’s kisses wrapped around both of them, with the slide of their bodies hard and bare and open, together. Sousuke holds him after, tangles their legs together, while Makoto melts back into the mattress, eyelids fluttering, unable to stop thinking about the warm mess caught on their stomachs. Sousuke gets this crazy idea, slipping his fingers between Makoto’s legs, still slicked white, teasing gently around his entrance before sliding one in, making him gasp and whine.

They end up using the conditioner from Makoto’s bathroom, like two teenagers who don’t have the courage to go and buy lube, and it’s wild enough to make the blood in Makoto’s veins sing, his dick hard all over again. Sousuke slicks his fingers up all over again and tries not to look embarrassed when he works Makoto open, which Makoto finds unexpectedly endearing, and even more so when he quietly tells Makoto that if he wants to do the same, it’s fine too.

The second time Makoto comes it’s around Sousuke’s fingers, in his mouth, on his name, arching up and up, floating like tissue back down towards the earth thinking, dazed, yeah, Sousuke’s mouth is leaking a beautiful white, he’s smiling, Sousuke can’t leave now, because he’d be taking something of Makoto’s away.

When Sousuke jostles them around to fit properly in bed, stretching out into a long strip of bare skin and warm muscles, Makoto's heart pounds harder than it has the entire time he was being fucked.

“Hey,” Sousuke says, his voice hoarse and raw and full, “hey.”

He can’t even figure out how to explain what he feels: relief and happiness and yearning, still yearning, because all this want doesn’t just go away in a day, but he tries to start with a smile of his own.

 

\--

 

“I would be okay with it,” Sousuke admits, a quiet, sleepy phrase. “If the world ended right now.”

Sometimes Makoto gets this feeling. This feeling that Sousuke isn’t used to being like this, pried open from exhaustion and sadness, leaving his chest a plowed up grave, the perfect flowerbed.

He spreads himself comfortably over Sousuke’s body, presses their hearts together. Sousuke’s is a steady beat, one touch away from his own. He smiles. “But it won’t,” he reminds him, fingers pushing into the soft flesh of Sousuke’s lower lip, “it isn’t, not if we’re still here.”

(They could pretend, like this: Sousuke loose-limbed and comfortable, the heater on, soft jazz on the stereo, joking about replacing the light bulb in the flickering lamp. Sousuke healthy and the jagged protrusions of his ribs, his spine smooth themselves out. Sousuke hoisting heavy items over his shoulder, just to show off. But this isn’t their reality right now. Right now, tangling their fingers together into the fraying threads of their futures, their breaths mingling, uncertainties crushed to powder between the drum of their still-going hearts: right now, this is real, and they are real.)

“It won’t,” Sousuke agrees, his words rounded and trusting, so delicate that Makoto feels his heartbeat falter, “definitely not.”

 

.

.

.

 

_You must know life to see decay_   
_But I won't rot, I won't rot_   
_Not this mind and not this heart._

 

_._

_._

_._

 

**end.**

 

 


End file.
